The Importance of IT Partnerships in Healthcare
Partnerships with healthcare organizations can help strengthen operations and ultimately provide better patient care. When it is not possible to develop a solution in-house, it is beneficial to partner with vendors or entrepreneurs who can share their expertise and services.
Organizations with IT staff shortages, for example, can turn to partner-delivered services to fill a need quickly and efficiently. Such services can be tailored to fit shrinking budgets and keep operations running.
Partnerships are also critical within an organization. When using DevOps in healthcare, for example, not only the IT department is involved but also the financial, business and clinical teams within the system. DevOps — the discipline of integrating IT operations and software development — promotes collaboration, faster innovation and continuous improvement, which are essential principles of modern healthcare.
DISCOVER: How to use ServiceNow tools to drive digital transformation in healthcare.
Doing Better Data Analytics in Healthcare
Data and modern analytics help healthcare organizations drive important clinical and operational decisions.
When Chapel Hill, NC-based UNC Health deployed new telehealth services and digital tools during the pandemic, it incorporated information gleaned from those technologies into its data warehouse. Healthcare leaders can view dashboards with hospitalization forecasts, helping them begin planning for care needs.
A few years before the pandemic, Stockton, Calif.-based Community Medical Centers experimented. how to meet growing organizational needs for data analytics. After switching from freeware to the Tableau platform, the nonprofit can respond quickly to requests, especially during a pandemic.
“We were able to deploy and automate it so we could move on to other urgent projects instead of running daily reports,” said Javier Romo, CMC’s associate manager of business intelligence, in a recent one HealthTech feature.
EXPLORE: 3 ways independent hospitals can improve quality of care with IT investments.
Digital Transformation Enabled by Healthcare Solutions
At the University of Utah Health, when Donna Roach joined as CIO midpandemic, she led the way for a new digital-transformation roadmap, addressing a broader approach to care that includes better consumer experiences.
“When I came on board, there were people who were shocked by the term ‘customer experience,'” Roach said HealthTech. “They said, it looks like we’re talking about Costco. And I said, ‘Well, there’s nothing wrong with Costco.’ I realized that I needed to do some internal selling of concepts before I could run into implementation.”